In Pursuit of a Predator
by Selective scifi junkie
Summary: Fifth in my Sanctuary series. When Old City Sanctuary hears of what might be an abnormal predator in Montanna, Magnus takes Ashley, Will, Henry and Erica with her to investigate. But this leaves The Sanctuary perilously short handed with only Kate and Druitt... More details inside. Henry/Erica and Magnus/Druitt established.
1. Prosencephalon

**In Pursuit of a Predator**

 **Summary:** When Old City Sanctuary hears of what might be an abnormal predator in Montanna, Magnus takes Ashley, Will, Henry and Erica with her to investigate. But this leaves The Sanctuary perilously short handed with only Kate and Druitt...

 **Rating:** T for themes and suggestion, a pretty weak T to be honest. Much cleaner than what it follows.

 **Spoilers:** Within the show, potentially all of season 1 and 2. In season 3, Animus and For King and Country (sort of). No others. This is the fifth in my series of sanctuary fics which runs: Monster, Freedom, Sleeping Bear, Turn Again. **You must read all of these before this one,** or this one will make very little sense. They deviate progressively from canon.

 **Set:** Monster takes the place of Kali, Freedom a few weeks after For King and Country. All else follows from there. In real-world time, late 2010.

 **Disclaimer:** This world belongs to Tapping, Wood and Kindler alone. Only the plots are mine.

* * *

"Helen." Magnus blinked. She'd been dozing, John had woken half an hour ago and woken her. He hadn't meant to. He rarely slept through a night uninterrupted. She turned her head to look at him in the darkness. "Did I wake you again?"

"I wasn't asleep. What is it?"

"I just wanted to say that – that if anything comes of this, I won't desert you again." Magnus blinked.

"John,"

"Whatever happens Helen, I promise I will not desert you again. I know I failed you, but-"

"John, don't." He fell silent. "For one thing, you didn't mean to desert me with Ashley, I don't blame you for that. For another, nothing _can_ come of this, not in that sense." He frowned at her. She propped herself up on an elbow. "I'm amenorrhoeic. I have been more or less since about 1900. Most female mammals don't become infertile because of degenerative change, they have a set number of cycles they can have, then they stop. Every so often, I have a regenerative cycle and I'm fertile for a year or so, I used that to bear Ashley, but they're heralded by a characteristic type of abdominal pain, which I haven't had for a while. Now kiss me, then we should probably get up."

o0o0o0o

Will nodded at Magnus in greeting as he walked in to her office, Ashley, Bigfoot, Henry and Erica close behind him. He flopped down in to an armchair.

"Will," Magnus started, "while we're waiting for the other two, have you had any joy with Ciera?" Will hesitated. Ciera was one of the abnormals they'd snatched the better part of a year ago, the time they'd nearly been gassed to death.

"I said she was damaged, that's still true, but she's starting to believe she can be helped, and your guess was right Ashley. She _is_ sort of an empath, but she couldn't tell what anyone's feeling right now, she feels traces, impressions left in places where particularly strong emotions have been felt, or so she says."

Magnus raised her eyebrows. "Unusual, possibly unique."

"It's odd to watch, it took me a while to figure out how to get her up to ground level. She just will not walk through the main lab, the only couple of times we've tried it, she's burst in to tears and run back the way she came, and she couldn't even articulate what she'd felt." A shutter closed behind Magnus's eyes. She looked down. So whatever Ciera was feeling in the main lab had been Magnus. And Magnus did not want to remember it. Ashley had also looked away from the group straight at a wall.

Orangey-red light flashed in the corridor. Kate and John walked in.

"Sorry Helen."

"Not to worry, you're only a minute late." There was no pretence between the two of them now. Everyone knew they were sleeping together, nobody, except Ashley, minded. Will was sort of almost relieved. "Henry, Erica," Magnus continued "you said you had something for us."

"Yeah." Henry sat himself up straighter. "Something interesting came up in the CAMM files-"

"The bunch we stole a few from, so they went nuts and zombie-bombed us?" Kate asked.

Henry nodded. "Wasn't fun." Will privately agreed. He couldn't remember being sick with the virus, but the fight before that and how tired Magnus had been afterwards would have been enough, even if he hadn't gone and read Magnus's clinical notes.

"Yeah, but we're not scared of them." Ashley put in. "I think we scared _them_ pretty good. They haven't been back for more." Magnus looked deliberately at Henry.

"So yeah, they've been gathering reports from an area out in Montana of something they seem to think is an Abnormal. We went and did some digging and it looks like there's something in it. All the reports are around one town, and there are a lot of them for the size of the area."

"What sort of abnormal is being reported?" Magnus asked.

Henry hesitated. "Sketchy. I kind of assumed it was a predator because of a lot of the reports are based on dead deer and rabbits and stuff." Magnus and Ashley frowned simultaneously.

"So why an _abnormal_ predator?" Magnus asked.

"Couple of things don't fit. First, there just aren't wolves, or mountain lions, coyotes, not even many bears, and people have looked."

"You think the abnormal scares them off?" Ashley asked.

"Well nobody's found any other reason." Erica answered.

"There's also what it's killing." Henry continued. "Lots of deer, lots of mountain goats, almost no cattle. Other ranches in the state lose one animal in four hundred per year, this place it's more like four thousand." Magnus raised her eyebrows. "And people find wolf _tracks_ now and then, but they can never follow them. Even a pack of more than ten, the trail just vanished." Magnus shifted her weight back. She'd made her decision.

"Definitely worth a look. Good find Henry."

"We can't just walk in there though. The locals don't like scientists much."

"They know something?" Will suggested. Henry nodded.

"But they don't mind hikers. They have a guest house and stuff."

"So under cover?" Ashley asked. Henry nodded. "Cool. I'm in."

"Will, if dealing with the locals is likely to be a problem, I want you on this one."

Will nodded. "Sure. There's nothing here I can't leave."

Magnus was eyeing people in the room thoughtfully. "Not you." She said to Druitt. "I'd rather leave one teleporter here if we can." Ashley relaxed slightly. "Henry, do you want to come? You found it?" Henry hesitated and glanced at Erica.

"Can we both come?"

"Doctor Magnus," Erica started, "Ashley's been helping me with the stunners. I ought to be able to track like Henry can, I've just never tried." Magnus thought for a moment.

"So if you both came, it would be you two and Bigfoot left." She pointed to Kate and Druitt. "Kate, are you happy holding the fort down here?"

"You sure?"

"Bigfoot refuses to lead anything and you've been here longer than John."

"I guess then. How long'll you be gone?"

"We'll probably only be scouting around. Four days at the most."

Kate nodded. "OK. We should be able to handle that."

Magnus smiled. "Good. Can we leave tomorrow morning at, say, nine?" Nobody objected. "Then meeting dismissed. I'm sure you all have things to do." Will certainly did. He got up with the rest and set off after Erica. People started to split off, Kate and Ashley went one way, arguing about what sounded like pros and cons of buying something, Henry and Erica went the other.

"So if we're going to be away for a few days, what do we need to do about system maintenance?" She was asking.

"We just ask the techs at another Sanctuary to do it for us. It's not usually a problem." Will wanted to wait until as few people as possible were in earshot. He glanced over his shoulder. Nobody else was in sight.

"Hey, Erica!" She stopped and looked back. So did Henry. Will caught up with them. "Can I talk to you for a moment?" Henry understood that, so started walking again.

"Is this about field work?" Erica asked.

"Yeah, it is. I just wanna check you've thought this through. Most of the time in the field, we're fine, but every so often, it all goes insane, even on missions we're not expecting it to. It gets scary, it gets dangerous. My question is do you know how you're going to cope with that.?"

"You mean do I know I might end up changing?" Will nodded once. Erica drew breath slowly. "Yes." She glanced away. "It doesn't scare me as much as it did, I've got a better idea of how strong I am and…" she paused, as though wondering how to word something "and I trust, for want of a better word, that I'll still be me if it does happen. Henry says it's his default fall back in a fight now."

"What do you think made that change?" Erica shrugged.

"Just spending time in HAP form I think, and realising that I still think like me." Will smiled. She smiled back. He'd seen her and Henry chasing round the Sanctuary a couple of times.

"OK. I'm glad you're more comfortable now."

* * *

 **Amenorrhoeic:** Does not have menstrual periods, therefore is not fertile.

 **I doubt this will get many readers, but if you're here, please let me know what you think**


	2. Mesencephalon

"That's what you did wrong." Miss Freelander said, pointing at one of five nearly identical icons on John's tablet screen. "For hydrostat controls, it's the blue one, then everything else is probably exactly what you did, just you got the first bit wrong and confused it."

"It always seems a very fragile system given how small an error is needed to do damage."

"Yeah, but then the failsafes hit and you called me, and I can fix it." Kate put the tablet back next to the creature's tank and turned to walk away. Her phone rang in her pocket. Helen? She and the others had been gone for three days, they'd had no contact for two of those days, apparently phone signal was scant.

"Sorry, I have to get this." The girl took the phone out and answered it. "Yeah. Hey Squid. Yeah, I know I'm not Ashley, she told you she was taking off. Unless it's a declaration of undying love, anything you can say to her you can say to me." She put the phone on loudspeaker. "Right then, I'm going to assume it was going to be undying love and warn Ash."

"Alright, alright." The voice on the other end of the line said. "I heard something about a trade."

"That's not much, Squid."

"Shut up and let me finish. I know it involves humanoids, things that can at least pass for humans."

"What, empaths or something?"

"Or something. I have a place and a possible time."

"What's the place?"

"How well do you know the red-light zone?" John felt his throat tighten.

"Well enough."

"St Cloud street?"

"Yeah."

"Somewhere on the south end of that, there's a bigger house than the rest. That's where the cargo's going."

"What's the big house? Depot? Bunker?"

"I don't know."

"When's this happening?"

"Tomorrow night, two-ish. And I got a couple of names."

"Uh-huh?"

"Cole Roche and Dycer."

"Dycer who? Or who Dycer?"

"Dycer. That's all I know." She sighed.

"OK. Thanks. We'll pay you if it throws anything up." She hung up and sat down on the ledge of a cage window, head hanging forwards. Would she want to chase the lead up, with just two of them? He hoped not. Walking the streets of a red light district in the dead of night would be far too reminiscent of his hunting.

"We can't go in like we would if everyone was here." Miss Freelander said, pulling John out of his own thoughts. "We need more than two, and we can't pull from other Sanctuaries at 30 hours notice, not for something like this." She was uncomfortable with her responsibility, that much was obvious. There was nobody here to defer to, trying to contact Helen would be an admission of defeat, and she might be too proud for that, and reaching Helen might be difficult. John sat down beside her.

"Miss Freelander, when wondering what to do, I find it helps to consider what I could do, even the ridiculous." She sighed.

"We could do nothing. We could tip the police off. We can't go in ourselves, not just two of us."

"All of that seems sound to me. Why would you not do nothing?" She blew out hard.

"In case Squid's right, I guess, and we leave a bunch of sentients in abusive hands."

"And why would you not contact the police?"  
"They get pissed at us if we give them false info, and Squid sends us on wild goose hunts now and then. And they don't like it if we tell them to chase abnormals, that's our job. So because we're not sure…" She stopped suddenly, as though something had just struck her. "We need to be sure. We can't go in guns blazing, but we can scope it out." John held his breathing even with an effort. If it had to be done, it had to be done. She looked across at him. "I could go on my own if you wanna sit this one out, or I could take the Big Guy." John shook his head.

"When observing it is better to be unobtrusive. There, I think, a Sasquatch will not help you." And he could not in good conscience ask a young lady to walk in such a place alone, probably in the dead of night. "I will go with you."

"Thanks."

o0o0o0o

The dim orange glow of the street lamps eclipsed any natural light from above and gave everyone a deathly pallor. There were very few people out. Fewer still were not on nefarious business, John suspected. Miss Freelander had already warned off one man who'd asked her to go with him, saying he'd pay better than John would. John had felt that to be unfair. Miss Freelander's dress was far from immodest by the standards of the day. Even so, there were eyes on them. John felt as though he walked alone in a bright spotlight. It took a great deal of effort not to flinch from every passing stranger. By daylight, he could walk in any reputable district anywhere he was not wanted for murder with little fear now. He had felt no bloodlust at all since Helen had taken the creature from him, he had almost ceased to expect to. But in a place such as this at an hour such as this, every shadow held eyes. He wanted nothing better than to flee, to hide in a shadow and disappear to safety, or even to take to his heels and run.

"There." Miss Freelander said quietly, pointing with her elbow. "St Cloud street." They crossed the road and turned up it. As Squid had described, one house near the far end was two or three times the size of any other. "That's it." John nodded mutely in agreement. Miss Freelander looked both ways, then slipped in to a connecting alley, near enough to watch the large house, not quite near enough to be easily seen. It was a little before a quarter to two. They had a while to wait.

And wait they did. Miss Freelander seemed fairly at ease, leaning against a wall, shifting her weight now and then. John never left the edge of mania. If walking had made him feel exposed, standing still felt like waiting for the headman's axe. After what felt like an eternity, though in reality it had been under an hour, Miss Freelander straightened up.

"Stay here. I'm going to take a closer look."

"Miss-"

"I'm fine. Just stay here." John liked this even less. This was no place for a young woman to walk alone, and he for his part had been very glad of her presence. She had barely reached the far side of the road when John heard footsteps behind him. He looked round. A young woman was walking towards him, hands in the pockets of her fur coat, a choker sat around her neck, her black hair falling past it. She looked latina, even with that deceptive pallor of the street lamps. Her legs were bare, red heels kept her feet off the pitted asphalt. Nothing of her dress showed from beneath the coat. All this John noticed in the time it took him to draw breath and look away. He could not look at her. He dared not. He had no doubt as to what she was, he'd become very good at identifying them. He was breathing fast. He heard her footsteps pause, then start again.

"Hey there." A woman's voice, very likely hers. He didn't look round. He didn't dare. "Watcha doin' out all alone at this hour?" He could not answer her. He could not look at her. She stepped up beside him. He could have knocked her off her feet with one hand without moving his feet. "You lookin' at the St Clouds place?" Miss Freelander was out of sight. John felt as though he was rooted to the ground. "I'm not just tryin'a take their business for myself when I say it, but… I wouldn't. I doubt half of those girls is clean, and I've heard it said they're not… kind hearted I guess. They won't open up, try to understand you, understand what you want from them. Sure, they'll spread their legs, but that's all they'll do. I've heard people sayin' that some of them aren't there willingly, and you don't want nothing to do with that. That's an awful thing."

"Please," John started, finding his voice at last, still not daring to look at the woman. "Just leave me alone." She didn't walk away.

"Is it not women?" She asked. "Cause I know some real sweet boys who are out alone."

"Please." John repeated. He heard her sigh.

"OK." She took a couple of steps. "Whatever it is you're lookin' for, I hope you find it."

John did not dare move until her footsteps had faded and Miss Freelander was scudding back across the road towards him.

"I can't see anything. Squid's intel was wrong. Who was that?"

"It doesn't matter. Let's go home." She glanced about, then offered her arm. Then they were gone. John bade Miss Freelander good night and all but ran back to his bedroom.

 **It is my custom to ask at this point; what are my chapter names?**


	3. Telencephalon

Miss Freelander kindly let the matter rest until late that morning.

"What do you think that place was? I couldn't see anything useful." John hesitated, but decided to answer truthfully.

"Miss Freelander, I have no doubt that that house was a bordello."

"A what?"

John hesitated again. This wasn't a fitting thing to discuss with a young lady. "A brothel."

Miss Freelander cursed quietly. He probably needn't have worried. "Squid said they were bringing humanoids in. So if they are, they'll be using abnormals as…" She looked up at him. "We gotta get hold of Ash and Magnus."

But that, it turned out, was more easily said than done. Helen, Ashley, Doctor Zimmerman, Mr Foss and Erica (whose surname he had never discovered) were all out of range of any signal masts.

"You can go." Miss Freelander said, the moment she'd finished leaving a recorded message for Erica. "You can just teleport in there and get this to Magnus."

"No." John said shortly. "Teleporting in to an area I have never seen is strictly a last resort, and time was we could never have reasonably expected to get news to people in a different country and get their reply inside two days. They are a competent group of people, we allow them time to respond."

John didn't like his solution any more than Miss Freelander did, but, he flattered himself, he did a better job of hiding it. He found himself something useful to read and settled down in the library. She paced and fidgeted and worried at her phone.

.

In fact, it was only four hours before Helen called. Miss Freelander immediately picked the call up and set the phone on the table between them so they both could hear it.

"Yeah."

"Kate, we got your messages. Are you alright?" There was quite a lot of background noise, as though they were in a vehicle moving at speed.

"Yeah, nobody here is hurt, but we got a tip from Squid and it led us somewhere."

"Go on?"

"He said there were humanoids being trafficked in to a house on St Clouds street. We didn't see the transaction, we went and looked at the place, we think it's a brothel, we've got some evidence that coercion or force might be involved in keeping girls in there."

"Hold on, trafficking and prostitution? Kate, that's a police matter. We tip them off and leave well alone unless we think there are abnormals directly involved. Have you seen any evidence of that?"

"No, I guess not, other than what Squid said."

"Then call the – oh no, that probably isn't a good idea. Do you have a police record Kate?" She hesitated.

"No convictions, but-"

"Understood. Leave it then. I'll do it when I get back."

"The cop you want is called Beth Smallbone." Doctor Zimmerman put in. "She tends to take most of the trafficking-prostitution type offences in the district."

"Doc, are you on your way home?"

"Yes, we plan to drop the car off in Great Falls in about two hours, then Ashley can shuttle us home."

"Any specimens with you?"

Helen laughed. "No, I can't think they'd take kindly to that."

"So the abnormal's a sentient?"

"Yes, they're HAPs. A remarkably stable social group of HAPs and humans together, about two hundred and fifty in all. Perhaps the most remarkable thing we've learned is that in that community at least, humans and HAPs breed together freely, so we've been approaching the taxonomy of HAPs, and therefore possibly other similar phenotypes, with an entirely false set of assumptions." She had that rush to her voice, the rush that came when she was describing something that was new and exiting to her. It had hardly changed in a hundred and thirty years. John smiled slightly. Someone spoke indistinctly in the background on the other end of the line. Helen replied, just as indistinctly, then said

"I'll explain to anyone who finds this as interesting as I do when we get back. See you in a few hours."

o0o0o0o

It took about two hours and forty minutes from Kate's phonecall for all of them, and all their gear, to be back in the entrance hall of the Sanctuary. John, Kate and Bigfoot had all appeared to greet them.

"So what did you find?" John asked. Magnus shook her head.

"You first. Will's going to hand this to the police tonight, tell us everything you know, from the beginning."

"There's tea." Bigfoot said.

Magnus smiled. "How well you know me. Come on." She started walking towards the sitting room. Kate followed, and told her Squid's message, their decision to stake the place out, what a passer by had told John. Magnus saw John's eyes fix on his tea. There was more to how he'd obtained that information, and whatever it was was hurting him.

"Right." Will said slowly. "An informant called us, we went and looked at the place, couldn't see anything, a passer by said… what? Don't knock on that door, that's a bawdy house?"

"That the women within were not there willingly, and that they were…" Druitt tailed off.

"OK." Will said quickly. "I might be able to get Beth to take an interest in that, I might not if she's really busy right now."

"Then please do try."

"Now?"

"You've driven quite a few hours today, on little sleep. I think you're entitled to sit for a bit." Will nodded in thanks and lifted his coffee to his mouth.

"Now your turn, Helen." John turned to face her, she faced in to him. "What did you find?" Magnus felt herself smile and glanced across at Will.

"As I said, HAPs. Entirely fearless HAPs. Not only do they not attempt to supress transformations, they're sought and celebrated in the individuals which have them. And it seems our genetic interpretation of HAPs was very far wrong; they are a human subspecies after all, but with no physical markers when they're in the resting state. This town is about two-thirds HAP, one third normal human, they've been breeding freely for decades. If they'd give us familial DNA, we could probably pinpoint the critical loci of mutation. And our assumptions about what triggers the initial transformations were quite possibly false. Henry and the English HAPs have no evidence of transformations at all until their late twenties. These HAPs report them in children as young as twelve."

"So a difference in the genetic clock?" John asked.

"Possibly, or possibly it works like induction of puberty in many mammals; living in a large group or in contact with those who've already undergone the changes induces earlier physical maturity. Henry had no contact with other HAPs at all between the ages of five and nearly thirty."

"So how do you intend to tell?"

"Well getting them to trust us enough to study them could be a challenge." Magnus said.

"They've survived for a long time by keeping themselves to themselves." Will added. "The problem is that with CAMM sniffing around, they could find themselves needing help."

"What does CAMM even stand for?" Kate asked.

"Confederation for the Advancement and Monetization of Monsters." Will said. Magnus felt her jaw tighten slightly. It wasn't news to her, but their very name made her angry. "Yeah, that's… that's what they call themselves."

"Cold." Kate said.

"Yeah." Will said. "Judging by what Henry's read in the files we hacked from them, they're not Cabal remnant, we did them a favour by taking the Cabal out. The Cabal were out-competing them."

"It's always the way." Magnus said. "In any criminal landscape, when you remove the strongest, another rises up."

"So we just keep fighting." Will said.

"We become the strongest." Magnus said. "And we hold our position."

"Aren't you the biggest network?" Kate asked. "On the illegal side, we were always trying not to let the Sanctuaries catch us. Sure, the other gangs would shoot to kill, but it was you guys we were scared of."

Magnus sighed. "In a way, that's encouraging, but it could make us less approachable to abnormals who need shelter. Will, go and tell Officer Smallbone what we know. Kate, anything else to report?"

She shook her head. "Other than that it's been quiet."

"Your time is your own then." Kate got up and left on Will's heels, leaving Helen with John.

 **Fin**

 **Another one is in the works**


End file.
